October 9, Ordinary 28C (Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7)
It’s not that Babylon was backward. But it wasn’t home.
“I could never live in a place like this.” I remember the day the movers came to pack up my belongings and move me out of the parsonage where I served in rural South Dakota. It was a tiny town with an abandoned gas station, no school, no bank, no café. When one of the movers asked where they could go to get lunch, I told him—ten miles away in the next town. And then he said it: “I could never live in a place like this.”
He said it more than once, in fact, throughout the day. The refrain gave me pause. I had, in fact, “lived in a place like this.” For four years I had called it home. Sort of.
I’m not sure I’ve ever said such a thing out loud, but I’m sure I have at least wondered about it. Could I live in a place like this? It didn’t seem that difficult, as a young adult, to travel to and live in Japan. But lately I have felt less accommodating and more concerned about the lack of amenities, the politics, or the simple loneliness that might come with living in a given place.
